[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 29 (Tuesday, March 17, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H1169-H1170]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         REMOVING U.S. ARMED FORCES FROM BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 21, 1997, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  (Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his 
remarks.)
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I would like to draw to the attention of my 
colleagues two House concurrent resolutions that we will be voting on, 
one today and one tomorrow.
  The one tomorrow is offered by the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Campbell), which I think we should pay

[[Page H1170]]

close attention to and, hopefully, support. This is H. Con. Res. 227. 
It is a concurrent resolution directing the President, pursuant to 
section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove United States 
Armed Forces from the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  The troops should never have been sent there in the first place. 
There was a lot of controversy. It was far from unanimous consent from 
the Congress to send the troops there. They were sent there in 1995, 
and they were to be there for 18 months, and each time we came upon a 
date for removing the troops, they were extended.
  Currently, it is the President's position that the troops will stay 
indefinitely. He has not set a date, although the Congress has set a 
date for this June for all funding to be removed as of June and the 
troops should come home. This resolution more or less states that same 
position. I strongly favor this, and I believe that the Congress should 
send a strong message that we should not casually and carelessly send 
troops around the world to police the world. This is a good way for us 
to get into trouble.
  Our national security is not threatened. There was no justification 
for our troops to be sent there. There are always good reasons, though, 
given because there are problems. Well, there are problems every place 
in the world. If we try to solve all the problems of the world, we 
would not have troops in a hundred countries like we have now, we would 
have them in three or four hundred countries. But it is true that we 
send troops with the most amount of pressure put upon us to do it.
  There are certain countries, like in Rwanda, Africa, we certainly did 
not apply the same rules to that country as we do to Bosnia and the 
Persian Gulf and Iraq. We did not do this when we saw the mass killings 
in the Far East under Pol Pot.
  So, under certain circumstances where there is political pressure 
made by certain allies or by interests of oil, then we are likely to 
get involved. But the principle of a noninterventionism foreign policy 
should make certain that we, the Congress, never condone, never 
endorse, never promote the placement of troops around the world in 
harm's way because it is a good way for men to get killed and, for most 
purposes, the lives of our American soldiers are too valuable to be put 
into a situation where there is so much harm and danger.

  Fortunately, there has been no American deaths in this region, but 
there is a good reason for those troops to come out. The peace has not 
been settled, though, there. It is not going to be. And our 16,000 or 
20,000 troops that we have had there will not be able to maintain the 
peace as long as these warring factions exist. They have existed not 
for months, not for a few years, but literally for hundreds of years if 
not thousands of years people in this region have been fighting among 
themselves.
  So it is not our responsibility. Yes, we can condemn the violence; 
and who would not? But does that justify the taxing of American 
citizens and imposing a threat to American lives by imposing and 
sending our troops to all these hot spots around the region?
  So I strongly urge my fellow colleagues to look carefully at this 
resolution tomorrow and assume congressional responsibility. It is not 
the responsibility of the President to wage war, to put troops around 
the world. That is a congressional responsibility.
  So although there has been no declaration of war, we are sitting 
ducks for a war to be started. So let us stop the war before it gets 
started.
  I think we should strongly endorse this resolution and make sure 
these troops come home. It is interesting that there is a fair amount 
of support for this, and we obviously won the vote on this last year to 
say the troops should come home in June of this year. I suspect and 
hope that this will be restated, and there will be no excuse to extend 
their stay in this region.
  But at the same time we win those kind of votes, and there is a 
strong sentiment here in the Congress when we are required to vote and 
there is certainly a strong sentiment among the American people that we 
ought to be dealing with our problems here at home, we ought not to 
assume the role of world policemen, and we ought to mind our own 
business, and we ought to be concerned about the sovereignty of the 
United States, rather than sending our troops around the world under 
the auspices of the United Nations and NATO and literally giving up our 
sovereignty to international bodies. We were very confused as to who 
was really in charge of foreign policy in Iraq, whether it was Kofi 
Annan or whether it was our President.

                          ____________________